Centuries ago, the first fragrant revolution shaped the world. By a generous interpretation of history, the jasmine revolution’s origins may be traced to India, to the aromatic mountain slopes of Idukki, Kerala. Pepper and cloves shaped Indian history; the invaders who came in search of the wealth that was spice were followed by invaders who came in search of the wealth, generated by spice. The last of them, the British, left India in 1947, leaving the tropical aroma of Indian democracy behind.
It’s a convoluted premise, but an India that believes in karma can understand it. Even before Anna Domini began, before the first white man set foot in India, the trade winds that blew across the Arabian Sea were redolent with spice.
Spice dominated the economies of empires—once a Roman emperor even paid protection money to Visigoths in pepper. By the time Europe took to the seas on the cinnamon quest, Arabs had become powerful and crafty middlemen who dominated the spice market of medieval Europe. The adventures of Sindbad and Sheherezade are not the only Arabian tales to rise from fertile medieval minds; the 5th century BC historian Herodotus was fooled by Arab merchants who wanted to protect their Great Indian Secret; they claimed spices grew on a secret mountain in Arabia, guarded by man-eating birds which lived in cinnamon nests. Just when the calendar invented by the Scythian monk Denis the Little entered its transitory cusp between BC and AD, Rome decided enough was enough; Romans were spending too much gold for pepper the Arabs bought from India and sold at hundred times its value.
Sounds familiar? Check your fuel gauge. Modern spice even has an atavistic color—the darkness of oil.
The ping-pong spice revolution continued. In 24 BC the Roman Empire invaded Arabia and was routed. Sixty-four years later, the Romans discovered a faster sea route to India and broke the Arab monopoly on spice. Six centuries afterward, when the Muslims conquered Alexandria they destroyed the spice trade between Rome and India. Its price spiked in Europe. Arabs wrested exclusive distribution rights from the Europeans.
This is where karma comes in and becomes kismet. In 1960, the first WMD was created in Baghdad—OPEC—a powerful distribution cartel that marked the end of Western dominance of Arabia and inaugurated the Arab-Islamic dominance of the world.
The West’s answer was to combine morality with greed. It exported democracy run by petty tyrants and supported despots to keep the petrobalance of power in region. In countries with century old tribal gestalt, democracy became a parody for dictators—Robert Mugabe, Issayas Afework, Sekou Toure —who ruled with perverted, brutal mandates, using the same methods of suppression feudal empires practiced centuries ago.
The jasmine revolution is only a metaphor for the clash of civilizations that had occurred way back in 1435, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, destroying the spice route between the East and the West.
History is inevitably decided by geography. Centuries later, oil pipelines replaced spice routes, whose control then decided the fate of economies and empires. The ancient Arab civilization—that once had much in common with India—with its astronomers and mathematicians was buried in the sands of history.
Private jets and bulletproof limousines replaced the caravans of Ibn Batuta and Ahmad Ibn Fadlan caravans. The jails filled up as dictators fought to keep their newfound spice gardens fecund. The ones who kept them in power kept their oilier-than-thou tradecraft intact. The fruits of their own jasmine revolutions were being guarded at the expense of millions of prisoners and the faceless dead in faraway lands.
Which is why Bashar Al Assad can kill thousands in Syria and remain unperturbed. Why Muammar Qaddafi in Libya cannot be overthrown. Why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can still rule in Iran after fixing the elections 1515 years after Persian reformer Mazdak overthrew the Persian king in a socialist revolution. Why the Taliban can hold Hamid Karzai to ransom in Afghanistan. Why fundamentalists controlling the Pakistani establishment can reduce a civilian president to a joke. Because today’s spice route from Arabia to the West controls the economy of democracies that oppose the very funders of fundamentalism; who in turn need their Euros and dollars to sustain tribal dictatorships which in turn suppress democratic movements that the West supports, at least in public. It’s complicated.
History has seen many popular revolutions that challenged dictators of antiquity—the Babylonian revolt in 615 BC, the Ionian revolt in 499 BC, Spartacus in 71 BC, the Maya Rebellion in Yucatan in 1847, about a decade before the Indian Mutiny began. Some failed, some ended in immeasurable bloodshed.
As popular revolts rage across the Middle East wanting to establish modern democracies, the Islamist militia is destroying the ancient civilization of the Indus delta. What is lost in the process is the irretrievable romance of the spice years.
There were no drones, missiles or submarines then. It was an undiscovered world, full of oceans that held gigantic monsters and sailors who braved mythology and pestilence, encouraged on by the fragrance of their cargo. It was a universe of romance, travel, discovery and, of course, death. But those times, however cruel had a balladic sense of excitement, where spice led to exotic bazars, conspiracies in caliphates and old parchment travelogues that recorded the mysteries of a slowly unraveling world.
Perhaps, democracy is too banal compared to all that. Will you pass the pepper, please.
(Ravi Shankar is Editor of New Indian Express in Delhi. He can be reached via email at: ravi@newindianexpress.com)
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